In a PCI-X system, a system in accordance with the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Special Interest Group's (SIG) PCI-Extended standard, master devices do not constantly send these queries or expect constant acknowledgements or responses from the slave device. Instead, once a master device sends a request to a slave device, the slave device becomes the master device and as a master device sends the requested data to the original requester. For clarity, the original master device will be referred to as a “requester” or “requesting device”, and the original slave device will be referred to as a “responder” or “responding device”.